Have you ever thought about making up a completely false persona when you're going out on a date? For whatever reason: you're weird, bored, hate your name, wish you came from more (or less) money. Well, I may or may not have gone out with a guy under false pretenses once. Bear with me, it wasn't exactly my intention to do so, it just kinda...happened.
When I lived in Buenos Aires I worked on a viral marketing project for a few months. My initial plan of action was to essentially spam all of my friends on facebook and see how far that took me. It turned out not that far. So, I came up with the brilliant plan to create a fake facebook account in order to spam complete strangers without having to add random friends and mess with my personal life. I was actually shocked at how many people accepted my "fake" friendship - within a day I had in the ballpark of 500 "friends." One of the guys I spammed ended up messaging me back and asking me ("Lauren") out. He was a cute British guy living in BsAs, and what kind of American girl isn't a sucker for a British accent? So after a couple of messages back and forth I agreed to go on a date. Movies and some drinks.
We arrived at the movies, and we immediately recognized each other - I used a real picture after all. He didn't introduce himself by name so I wasn't given a window to do so either. Into the movies we go, barely having had more than a couple minutes of light chit chat. After we head to a bar and order some beers. At this point we'd been out for a couple of hours, and my palms were quickly becoming sweaty and all I could think about was that I gotta come clean and tell this guy that I'm not Lauren, I didn't go to Michigan and study Business, and I don't speak French and Chinese in addition to Spanish. But how could I artfully bring that up without making me seem like a freak? The answer is you can't.
Conversation was flowing smoothly and he seemed to be enjoying my company so I thought now's as good a time as any, just do it. I casually said, "Wanna hear a funny story?" And then launched into the tale of the marketing campaign, and the fake profile and thus fake identity, and topped it off with "I SWEAR I'm not crazy!" trying to laugh it off. He unfortunately wasn't so amused and moments later asked for the check. I am not the best liar and it doesn't come naturally to me, but I sometimes wonder if I were, how long I could've kept this second life going and dated the Brit. Wouldn't it have been a great story to tell the grandkids?
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